Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Folks, I just purchased an Amazon Echo (Alexa) and I’ll tell you up front that I love it. I’m enjoying the heck out of summoning my favorite music with a simple voice command, ordering up a hypnotherapy session when my back hurts and tracking Amazon packages with a four-word request. I’m not sure all of these options are important but they sure are fun to use.

Being who I am, I’ve also checked out what, if anything, Alexa can do to address health issues. I tested it out with some simple but important comments related to my health. I had high hopes, but its performance turned out to be spotty. My statements included:

In running these informal tests, it became pretty clear what the Echo was and was not set up to do. In short, it offered brief but appropriate response to communications that involved conditions (such as experiencing suicidality) but drew a blank when confronted with some serious symptoms.

For example, when I told the Echo that I had a migraine, she (yes, it has a female voice and I’ve given it a gender) offered vague but helpful suggestions on how to deal with headaches, while warning me to call 911 if it got much worse suddenly. She also responded appropriately when I said I was lonely or that I needed help.

On the other hand, some of the symptoms I asked about drew the response “I don’t know about that.” I realize that Alexa isn’t a substitute for a clinician and it can’t triage me, but even a blanket suggestion that I call 911 would’ve been nice.

It’s clear that part of the problem is Echo’s reliance on “skills,” apps which seem to interact with its core systems. It can’t offer very much in the way of information or referral unless you invoke one of these skills with an “open” command. (The Echo can tell you a joke, though. A lame joke, but a joke nonetheless.)

Not only that, while I’m sure I missed some things, the selection of skills seems to be relatively minimal for such a prominent platform, particularly one backed by a giant like Amazon. That’s particularly true in the case of health-related skills. Visualize where chatbots and consumer-oriented AI were a couple of years ago and you’ll get the picture.

Ultimately, my guess is that physicians will prescribe Alexa alongside connected glucose meters, smart scales and the like, but not very soon. As my colleague John Lynn points out, information shared via the Echo isn’t confidential, as the Alexa isn’t HIPAA-compliant, and that’s just one of many difficulties that the healthcare industry will need to overcome before deploying this otherwise nifty device.

Still, like John, I have little doubt that the Echo and his siblings will eventually support medical practice in one form or another. It’s just a matter of how quickly it moves from an embryonic stage to a fully-fledged technology ecosystem linked with the excellent tools and apps that already exist.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Recently, direct-to-consumer telemedicine provider Doctor on Demand released some statistics on its performance in 2017. While some of the report was self-congratulatory, I still think the data points are worth looking at, especially for clinicians.

For starters, it’s worth noting that the company now considers itself a fully integrated medical practice. For example, it’s begun offering lab testing services through Quest Diagnostics and Lab Corp. as part of a program to control chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels.

Another factoid the stats offer is that its physicians are generally in their mid-career; apparently, Doctor on Demand’s average physician has 15 years of experience. The company doesn’t offer any perspective on why that might be, but it suggests to me that clinicians who participate are both confident that they can manage care remotely and comfortable with technology.

Why is that the case? My guess is that this work may not be attractive to younger doctors, who might feel uneasy managing patients online given their lack of experience. It also suggests older physicians, some of whom still consider telemedicine to be a poor substitute for face-to-face care, probably aren’t engaging with telemedicine either.

Other data provided by Doctor on Demand includes the top reasons for visits included treatment of cold and flu, prescription refills and infections, which isn’t surprising. It also notes that mental health visits climbed 240% over 2016, with anxiety, depression and stress being the most common symptoms treated. This is more interesting, as it suggests that among other problems, consumers feel they aren’t getting their mental health needs met in real life.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the company’s self-reported benefit statistics, I’m taking them with a large grain of salt, but I found them to be worth a look nonetheless. The company says it saved its patients nearly $1 billion in healthcare costs and saved over 1.6 million hours that would otherwise have been spent in doctor’s waiting rooms. These results were allegedly generated by a base of 1 million patients, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

I’m not writing this to suggest that Doctor on Demand is better or worse than other telemedicine companies and video services offered by privately-employed physicians or hospital telemedicine services. Still, I got a kick out of learning what trends a well-positioned telemedicine service was seeing in the marketplace. While Doctor on Demand’s results may not reflect the market as a whole, they certainly offer food for thought.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Tell me if you’ve run into the following.

You call your primary care doctor to set an appointment, wading through the inevitable voice-response prompts and choosing the right number to reach a clerk. You wait on hold for a while – perhaps a LONG while – and finally get a clerk.

The clerk asks why you’re booking an appointment, and you name a problem. The clerk says she needs to consult a nurse about the problem before she books you, so you wait on hold while she calls the nurse. Of course, the nurse is too busy to answer her phone, so you leave her a voicemail message.

The next day she finally calls back and tells you a standard appointment will be fine. Yay.

This might sound like an incredibly twisty process, but this is exactly how it works at my PCP office. And the truth is that I’ve been run through a similar mill before by other primary care practices of this size.

In theory, many of these problems would go away if my PCP office simply took advantage of the scheduling tools its portal already offers. But for some reason its leaders don’t seem to value that function much; in fact, when it went offline for a while the practice didn’t seem to know.

But there are alternatives to this crazy workflow pattern that don’t require the re-invention of the lightbulb. In fact, all it would take is adding a few functions to the portal to make progress.

Gathering the threads

From what I can see, the key to streamlining this type of process is to gather these threads together. And it doesn’t take much imagination to picture how that would work.

What if my initial contact with the practice wasn’t via phone, but via more sophisticated interface than a calendaring app? This interface should ask patients what prompts their requested visit, and offer a pulldown menu providing a list of standard situations and conditions.

If a patient chooses a condition that might be hazardous, the system would automatically kick the request to a nurse, who can email or call the patient directly, possibly avoiding hit-or-miss phone tag. Or the practice could provide the nurse with a secure messaging client to use in connecting with clients on the go. Using such an app, the nurse could even conference in the doctor as needed.

Meanwhile, if a patient wants to get a provider’s opinion on their condition – whether they should wait and see what happens, go to urgent care, make an appointment or hit the ED – the same interface could route the request to the provider on call. If the patient can be treated effectively with a basic appointment, the clinician routes the request to the front desk, with a request that the clerk schedule an appointment. The clerk reaches out to the patient, which means the patient (me!) doesn’t have to call in and wait for an age while the clerk handles other issues.

The same process would also work well for medication refill and referral requests, which my practice now handles in the same cumbersome, time-wasting manner. Not only that, automating such requests would leave an audit trail, which doesn’t exist at present.

Pursuing the obvious

What bugs me about all of this is that if I can imagine this, anyone in healthcare could — it’s a massive case of pursuing the obvious. Though I’m an HIT fan, and I follow the industry closely, I’m no programmer or engineer. I’m just somebody who wants to do my business effectively. Surely my PCP does too?

Of course, I know that just because an approach is possible, it doesn’t mean that it will be easy to implement. Not only that, only the largest and most prosperous practices have enough clout to demand that vendors develop such features. So it may not be as easy as it should be to put them in place.

Still, I see a crying need here, or perhaps one might call it an opportunity. If we arm primary care doctors – who will play a steadily-growing role in next-gen systems – with better workflow options, every part of the system will benefit.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

I am reasonably comfortable with my primary care practice which, though not exactly chi-chi – no latte machine in the lobby! — does a reasonably good job with the basics of scheduling, payment, referrals and the like. And I also like that my PCP is part of a multispecialty group linked together by an athenahealth EMR and portal, which makes it easier to coordinate my care.

But recently, I’ve run into some technical problems with the practice portal, repeatedly and inconveniently. And rather than take action, apologize or even acknowledge the problem on an executive level, the group appears to be doing nothing whatsoever to address the issue.

The issue I’m having is that while the portal is supposed to let you schedule appointments online, my last two didn’t show up in the group’s live schedule. This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. One of the appointments was to see a neurologist for help with blinding migraines, and trying to attend the non-existent meeting was a nightmare.

Because I needed my neurologist, I scraped myself out of bed, put on an eye mask to avoid extra light exposure – migraine makes you terribly light-sensitive – and had my husband guide me to the car. But when I walked into the lobby (peeking out from under the mask to avoid crashing into things) I was told that they had nothing for me on the schedule.

Almost crying at this point, and with migraine-induced tears streaming down my cheeks, I begged them to squeeze me in, but they refused. To add insult to injury, they all but told me that it must have been my fault that the appointment booking didn’t take. There was no “I’m sorry this happened” whatsoever, nor any suggestion that their technology might be glitchy. If I hadn’t been so sick I might have gotten into a screaming match with the supercilious receptionist, but given my condition I just slinked away and went back to bed.

I’ve since learned, from a much nicer clerk at the affiliated primary care practice, that the group has been getting scores of calls from similarly aggrieved patients whose time had been wasted – and health needs unmet. “Tell the doctor, so she can tell the practice management committee,” she told me. “This is happening all the time.”

Of course, because I write about health IT, I realize that practice leaders may be struggling with issues that defy an easy fix, but I’m still disappointed with their failure to respond publicly. There are many steps they could have taken, including:

* Putting a warning on their practice website, and (if possible) the portal that the scheduling function has issues and to double-check that their appointment registered
* Disabling the scheduling function entirely until they’re reasonably certain it works
* Putting a sign in on the practice’s front desk alerting patients about the problem
* Updating the practice’s “hold” message with an advisory

And that’s just what came to mind immediately. They could do postcards, email messages, letters, robocalls…I don’t care if they drive around town with a guy who shouts the message into a megaphone. I just want expect them to take responsibility and treat my time and health with respect. Sure, tech will go south, but if it does, own it! There’s no excuse for ignoring problems like these.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Initially, patient portals were rolled out to give patients access to their core medical information, with the hope that a more educated patient would be more likely to take care of their health. Over time, features like appointment setting and the ability to direct-email providers were added, with some backers predicting that they would make practices more efficient. And since providers began rolling out nifty new interactive portals, anecdotes have piled up suggesting that they are delivering the goods.

However, a new study suggests that this might not be the case — or at least not always. The researchers behind the study, published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, had predicted that when patients got access to a full-featured portal, clinic staffers’ workload would be cut. But they did not achieve the results they had expected.

The researchers, who were from the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, compared portal adoption rates and the number of telephone calls received at four clinics affiliated with a university hospital between February and June 2014.

They found that despite growing adoption rates of the portal at all four clinics, call volumes actually increased at two of the clinics, which included a commercial, community-based health center and a university-based health center. Meanwhile, call volume stayed level at the two other clinics, a rural health center and a federally-qualified health center. In other words, in no case did the volume of phone calls fall.

The researchers attempted to explain the results by noting that it might take a longer time than the study embraced for the clinics to see portals reduce their workload. Also, they suggested that while the portal didn’t seem to reduce calls, it might be offering less-concrete benefits such as increased patient satisfaction.

What’s more, they said, the study results might have been impacted by the fact that all four clinics were implementing a patient centered medical home model. They seemed to think that PCMH requirements for care coordination and quality improvement initiatives for chronic illness, routine screenings and vaccinations might have increased the complexity of the patients’ needs and encouraged them to phone in for help.

As I have noted previously, patients seldom see your portal the way you do. In that previous article, I described my largely positive — but still somewhat vexing – experience using the Epic MyChart portal as a patient. In that case, while I could access all of the data held within the health system behind the EMR pretty easily, getting the health system employees to integrate outside data was a hassle and a half.

In the case described in the study, it sounds like the portal may not have been designed with patient workflow in mind. With the practices rolling out a patient-centered medical home model, the portal would have to support patients in activities that went well beyond standard appointment setting and even email exchanges with clinicians. And presumably, it didn’t.

Bottom line, I think it’s good that this research has led to questions about whether portals actually make make medical practices more efficient. While there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that they do — so much that investing in portals still makes sense — it’s good to see questions about their benefits looked at with some rigor.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

A new study by Physicians Practice magazine suggests that medical groups still aren’t getting what they want out of their EHRs, with nearly one-fifth reporting that they’re still struggling with an EHR-related drop in productivity and others still trying to optimize their system.

Physicians Practice surveyed 1,568 physicians, advanced practice providers across the U.S. as part of its 2016 Technology Survey. Nearly a third of respondents (31.9%) were in solo practice, and 34% in 2 to 5 physician practices, with percentages largely dropping as practice sizes grew larger.

Specialties represented included pediatrics (17.5%), family medicine (16.2%), OB/GYN (15.2%), psychiatry (12%), internal medicine (10.6%), surgery (2.9%), general practice (2.7%) and “other” at 22.9% (led by ophthalmology). As to business models, 63.3% of practices were independently-owned, 27.9% were part of an integrated delivery network and the remaining 8.8% were “other,” led by federally-qualified health centers.

Here’s some interesting data points from the survey, with my take:

Almost 40% of EHR users are struggling to get value out of their system: When asked what their most pressing technology problem was, 20.3% said it was optimizing use of their EHR, 18.9% a drop in productivity due to their EHR, and 12.9% a lack of interoperability between EHRs. Both EHR implementation and costs to implement and use technologies came in at 8%.

EHR rollouts are maturing, but many practices are lagging: About 59% of respondents had a fully-implemented EHR in place, with 14.5% using a system provided by a hospital or corporate parent. But 16.8% didn’t have an EHR, and 9.5% had selected an EHR (or a corporate parent had done so for them) but hadn’t fully implemented or optimized yet.

Many practices that skip EHRs don’t think they’re worth the trouble and expense: Almost 41% of respondents who don’t have a system in place said that they don’t believe it would improve patient care, 24.4% said that such systems are too expensive. A small but meaningful subset of the non-users (6.6%) said they’d “heard too many horror stories.”

Medical group EHR implementations are fairly slow, with more than one-quarter limping on for over a year: More than a third (37.2%) of practices reported that full implementation and training took up to six months, 21.2% said it took more than six months and less than a year, 12.8% said more than a year but less than 18 months, and 15.7% at more than 18 months.

Most practices haven’t seen a penny of return on their EHR investment: While just about one-quarter of respondents (25.7%) reported that they’d gotten ROI from their system, almost three-quarters (74.3%) said they had not.

Loyalty to EHR vendors is lukewarm at best: When asked how they felt about their EHR vendor, 39.7% said they were satisfied and would recommend them, but felt other vendors would be just as good. Just over 16% said they were very satisfied. Meanwhile, more than 17% were either dissatisfied and regretted their purchase or ready to switch to another system.

The big EHR switchout isn’t just for hospitals: While 62.1% of respondents said that the EHR they had in place was their first, 27.1% were on their second system, and 10.8% their third or more.

If you want to learn more, I recommend the report highly (click here to get it). But it doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way these winds are blowing. Clearly, many practices still need a hand in getting something worthwhile from their EHR, and I hope they get it.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

We’ve all heard stories about medical practices whose productivity crashed when they brought an EMR on board, for reasons that range from workflow problems to training gaps to problems with a wonky system. But if the following study is right, there’s reason to hope that health IT will actually improve productivity over time, according to a story in Medical Practice Insider.

According to research published in journal Health Affairs, physicians with health IT on board will be able to serve about 8 percent to 15 percent more patients than they could without health IT tools. And in practices where doctors have higher levels of EMR or portal adoption, the spike could be higher, according to the research, whose team includes former national coordinator David Blumenthal.

Meanwhile, practices that adopt emerging technologies such as remote care could allow doctors to perform 5 to 10 percent of care to patients outside of the office visit, and 5 to 15 percent of care could be performed asynchronously, reports Medical Practice Insider.

Another study cited by the article, done by the National Center for Health Statistics, notes that EMRs can offer varied clinical and financial benefits, such as greater availability of patient records at the point of care. And adjunct tools like e-prescribing capabilities and the ability to retrieve lab results can save time and effort, the NCHS study concludes.

These studies are encouraging, but they don’t say much about how practices can manage the workflow problems that keep them from realizing these results. While I have little doubt that health IT can increase productivity in medical practices, it’s not going to happen quickly for most. By all means, assume your medical practice will eventually leverage health IT successfully, but it won’t happen overnight.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Moving a medical practice from paper to an EHR is no picnic. Staff and physicians both may find the process difficult, and the changes they have to make to be threatening. But there are approaches you can take which can make the process easier. Here’s a nice triad of suggestions from EHR implementation manager Amanda Guerrero:

* Make workflow changes gradual:

Too often, medical practices assume that they can implement an EHR without making major changes to their workflow. The reality is, however, that many processes which worked fine on paper don’t work when you switch to using EHRs, Guerrero notes. So how do you go about making changes without upsetting and confusing staff and clinicians? The idea, she says, is to make sure changes happen gradually. Giving people time to adapt to changes helps a lot with staff morale. (It doesn’t hurt to explain how the changes will benefit both staff and patients, either.)

* Ask for feedback:

Bearing in mind that changes to workflow will have to be made, how do you choose which changes come first? One way, Guerrero says, is to ask the people who are using the EHR which processes are slowing things down the most. Be sure, she recommends, to include doctors, nurses, front desk and even billing staff in collecting feedback — after all, virtually any part of the practice can be affected by the EHR. Once you’ve figured out which areas are the most troublesome, arrange them in order of importance so you can take them on in the most effective manner.

* Educate patients:

Now that Meaningful Use has pushed practices into making patient health data available to them, it’s time to encourage them to use it. That being said, patients may be overwhelmed by the amount of data being presented, especially when interpreting lab results, Guerrero suggests. To reduce the impact of this change on patients, and avoid confusion, make sure you help them understand what they’re looking at and how it can help them improve their healthy, she says. And make sure let patients know you’re available to help answer questions.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Wouldn’t it be great if you rolled your EMR and, bam, all of the problems you hoped to solve were solved, just like that? Sure, but in most cases the technical rollout will do little to solve workflow problems unless you have them analyzed in advance, according to one doctor who’s taken part in a long, slow rollout. Here’s a quick overview of his organization’s progress: see what you think.

Going live is a far cry from having truly adopted an EMR, and getting to adoption is a very long, drawn-out process, said Dr. Fred M. Kusumoto, who spoke at a recent meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society.

Dr. Kusumoto, who’s with the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville Electrophysiology and Pacing Services, conceded that EMRs can help smooth communication between systems. The thing is, he noted, integrating systems won’t happen over night. After all, the workflow of doing integration is very complex, so much so that years hardly suffice. His organization began serving as “guinea pig” for its EMR vendor in 1996 and will as of 2013, will have one database using structured data, he said.

So, the million-dollar question is this: Has all of this effort been worthwhile? Dr. Kusumoto actually didn’t say, if the CMIO article I reviewed is accurate. Interesting. But he’s clearly learned a great deal, regardless of whether his rollout works out for Mayo. Here’s some of his suggestions on how to improve returns from your maturing EMR:

* Make sure all stakeholders are involved as the EMR migration, including administrators and IT staffers.

* Bear in mind that EMR rollouts are at their most flexible in the first few years, so don’t miss your chance to get involved early.

* EMR implementations (typically) involve a scanning phase where the institution captures written records and plans for turning the records into structured data. Make sure you leave enough time to do this right.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Here’s an EMR adoption study which interested me largely because it runs counter to what I would have predicted. The study, which surveyed physicians pre- and post- EMR implementation, found that doctors who owned a stake in their practice found their rollout to be tougher than physicians who didn’t have a stake.

I don’t know about you, but I would have assumed that the folks with more control — the owners — would have found it easier than those who have to adapt to the decisions others make. But it seems that physician-owners simply feel the pain of change more acutely.

To conduct the study, which was published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, researchers surveyed 156 physicians working with the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. The surveys included a pre-implementation questionnaire in 2005 and a post-implementation questionnaire in 2009.

Thirty-five percent of doctors who responded reported that implementation was very difficult, 54 percent said it was somewhat difficult and 12 percent not difficult. Those numbers square pretty well with what I’ve seen elsewhere. The twist here was that 38 percent of physicians with full or partial ownership stakes in their practices voted “very difficult,” versus 27 percent of non-owners. That surprised me. After all, aren’t most of the complaints coming from doctors who try to use the new systems?

According to Marshall Fleurant, MD, one of the study’s authors, the owners “probably experienced more underlying challenges associated with EHR implementation and workflow transformation” given their broader operational responsibilities.

While this study is interesting, it’s hardly the last word. Teasing out just which factors predict how doctors will react to EMR implementation, much less what it takes to support them, is still a new science. But it never hurts to bear in mind that physicians making critical management decisions get support, too.